Friday, October 19, 2012

Parents Force Gay Agenda Backtrack by School Board

When Christians became aware that the East Aurora (Illinois) school board had enacted a new transgender policy to allow students to willy-nilly declare their "sexual identity" (thus allowing devious boys to use girls' locker rooms, etc.), complaints flooded the school and within three days of its passing, the board rejected the new policy.

East Aurora School District 131 board members on Friday are expected to rescind a controversial policy to accommodate transgender students.

The decision would reverse a policy the board approved Monday that allows transgender students to use the bathroom or locker room that corresponds to their gender identity. The policy also specifies that transgender students are to be called by their chosen name.

Approval of the policy was a mistake, School Board President Annette Johnson says. She blames a district administrator for advising her panel the transgender policy was needed under the constantly changing Illinois school code. It turns out, the administrator was wrong.

The East Aurora school board voted to unanimously approve a policy that affects transgendered students Monday night.

. . . The student has the right to be addressed by the name they want to be called . . . “A court-ordered name or gender change is not required, and the student needs not change his or her official records,” the policy states.

In most cases, transgendered students should have access to the locker room that corresponds to their gender-related identity [regardless of their sex], according to the policy.

Classes or teams that are segregated by gender should also be open to students according to the gender that the student self-identifies with.

E-mails from outraged residents and organizations across the state began flooding board members’ inboxes, and by Wednesday afternoon, board members announced they would meet at 5:30 p.m. Friday to potentially rescind the policy.

“The board never at any time came up with this (policy) on their own,” School Board President Annette Johnson said Wednesday. Instead, board members simply thought they were keeping up with state code.

The policy, which sets forth several guidelines for school administrators to use when addressing transgender students, was brought forward by Christine Aird, the district’s assistant superintendent of elementary education, Johnson said. Based on the recommendation of Aird, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Joan Glotzbach and the School District’s attorney, “this is where we ended up,” Johnson said.

Johnson said she wasn’t even aware of the policy’s controversial nature until the e-mails started coming in Tuesday evening.

She said she “absolutely” felt that in presenting the board with the policy, Aird had been misleading.

“This is a biased, radical, and offensive school board decision that all Illinois taxpayers—especially Aurora community members with or without children in school—should vigorously and tenaciously oppose,” the IFI letter said.

By Wednesday, the board — facing the mounting criticism — quickly rethought the policy and announced they would reconvene Friday night to potentially repeal it.

The Special Meeting will be held to “discuss the rescission of School Board Policy 715.13 (Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students) and School Board Policy 715.13R (Administrative Procedures, Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students),” according to the district website.

On Tuesday, the Illinois Family Institue released an angry vitriol against the new transgender-inclusive policies.

"Apparently, all that’s needed for school personnel to be compelled to participate in a fiction is for a student to pretend 'consistently' at school that he or she is the opposite sex.

The school board is now imposing non-objective, 'progressive' moral, philosophical, and political beliefs—not facts—about gender confusion on the entire school. This feckless school board has made a decision to accommodate, not the needs of gender-confused teens, but their disordered desires and the desires of gender/sexuality anarchists who exploit public education for their perverse ends."

Think Progress corrected IFI's misinterpretation of transgender identities. "It’s important to note that in the new version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Orders (DSM-V), set to print in May 2013, trans identities are no longer classified as mental illness under 'Gender Identity Disorder,'" writes Zack Ford. Affirmation, says Ford, should be the only response towards the trans community.